PART II.

THE CHRIST WITHIN — THE MEMORY OF NATURE
THERE are a great many people who associate spirituality with a great show of emotionalism, but as we saw in the last chapter, this idea has abso- lutely no foundation in fact; on the contrary, the kind of spirituality which is developed by and asso- ciated with the emotional nature of the desire body is unreliable in the extreme; this is the variety that is generated in revival meetings where emotionalism is brought up to a high pitch, causing a person to make a great splurge of religious fervor which soon spends itself and leaves him exactly as he was before, much to the chagrin of the revivalists and other peo- ple who are engaged in evangelical work. But what else can they expect ? They set out to save souls with drums and fifes, with rhythmic revival songs, with appeals made in a voice which is raised and lowered in harmonic waves, all of which are as powerfully effective on the desire body as storms which stir the sea to fury and then subside. The vital body is much
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more set, and it is only when conversion affects this vehicle that it sticks and stays with a man or woman for life. Those who have the true spirituality do not feel saved one day, in the seventh heaven of ecstasy, and the next feel themselves down in the dumps and miserable sinners that can never be forgiven; for their religion is not based upon the emotional nature which feels these things, but is rooted in the vital body which is the vehicle of reason, set and persistent in the path it has once chosen. As new forms are propagated through the second ether of the vital body, so the HIGHER SELF, the CHRIST WITHIN, is formed through this same vehicle of generation, the vital body, in its higher aspects embodied in the two upper ethers.
But as a child that is born into the world requires nourishment, so also the Christ that is born within is a babe and requires to be nourished to the full stature of manhood. And as the physical body grows by a continual assimilation of material from the chem- ical region, the solids, liquids, and gases, so also, as the Christ grows, will the two higher ethers grow in volume and form a luminous cloud around the man or woman sufficiently discerning to set his or her face heavenward; it will invest the pilgrim with light so brilliant that he "walks in the light," as a mat- ter of actual fact. By the exercises given in the
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Western Mystery School of the Rosicrucians, it be- comes possible in time to detach the two higher ethers, and the man may then step away from his physical body, leaving it for a time invested and vitalized only by the two lower ethers; he is then what we call an INVISIBLE HELPER.
There are various grades of spiritual sight. One grade enables a man to see the ordinarily invisible ether with the myriads of beings that invest th#t realm. Other and higher variants give him the fac- ulty to see the desire world and even the world of thought while remaining in the physical body. But these faculties, though valuable when exercised under full control of the human will, are not sufficient to read the " MEMORY OF NATURE " with absolute ac- curacy. To do this and to make the necessary in- vestigations in order that one may understand how the "Web of Destiny" is made and unmade, it is necessary to be able at will to step from the phys- ical body and function outside in that soul body which we have spoken of as composed of the two higher ethers, this being also invested with the desire body and the mind. Thus the investigator is in full possession of all his faculties, he knows all that he knew in the physical world, and has the ability to bring back into the physical consciousness the things which he has learned without. When he has this
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ability lie must also learn to balance himself, to understand the things which he sees outside, for mark this: It is not enough to be able to step out- side the body into another world and to see things, there; we do not by that fact become omniscient any more than we understand what everything is used for and how everything works here in this physical world because we live here from day to day and year to year. It requires study and application to become thoroughly familiar with the facts of the invisible world as does it with the facts of the world in which we are now living in our physical bodies. Therefore the book, the " Memory of Nature," is not read easily at the first attempt or at the second either, for just as it takes a child time to learn how to read our ordinary books here, so, also, it requires time and effort to de- cipher this wonderful scroll.
It is a familiar fact to students of science that the history of the earth is written in unmis- takable characters upon the rocks and glaciers; upon every stone there is found some sign which guides the trained investigator in deciphering its message concerning the development of the earth during past ages, and it is wonderful to read in the text books upon this subject, how well the scientific investigators have been able to make a con- nected story out of these many clues. It is also well
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known that wherever we move individually, we leave behind us marks which may be traced though they are unseen even by ourselves. The wonderful in- genuity displayed by the Indians, as told by Fenni- more Cooper and others, in tracing their friends or their foes through the virgin forest guided by broken twigs, etc., is far exceeded by scientists today, who trace the criminal by his finger prints. The seemingly fantastic exploits of Sherlock Holmes are duplicated by actual experience in criminal detection. The ac- tions of men now living may be reproduced by the moving picture camera a hundred years hence when the real actors have long moldered in the grave ; and so we can by the light of these later discoveries pre- pare our minds for the belief that there is an auto- matic record of every human life and of the lives of communities, kept in what we may call, for want of a better name, the Memory of Nature. This shows the stages in evolution attained by all living things, and gives the ministers of God, the Recording An- gels, the needed perspective in order to aid us in our attainment of wisdom, knowledge, and power; the clue to what lessons are needed to carry us further on the Path. So far as the individual is concerned, this record starts at the moment when he draws the first breath and continues until the last respiration has emptied the arteries of blood. We know that the
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whole universe is vibrant with life, that each object constantly emits from itself vibratory waves which reveal its nature and presence. We also know that when a child takes its first complete breath, the physiological conditions in the heart are changed, the foramen ovale is closed, and the blood forced to cir- culate through the heart and lungs. There it meets the air charged with a picture of the surroundings Thus the blood, which is the vehicle of the Ego, ab- sorbs in the lungs a complete picture of the outside world. When it rushes through the left ventricle of the heart, it leaves an impress upon the little seed atom situated at the apex and which corresponds to the film of the camera, nor should it be an obstacle to belief in this idea that a large number of pictures must be imprinted upon a very small surface. When we consider that the picture of the Moon which we see in the retina is less than one two-hundredth part of one inch in diameter, we can see that a very small picture can be very distinct, for even within that small space we note upon the Moon a number of mountains and valleys with the naked eye. The pic- ture of a man at a distance of a hundred feet or so is not one-twentieth of an inch in size, according to an authority upon this subject, yet we distinguish in that minute picture the expression of the face, the pattern of the clothing, etc. Similarly, there is upon
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this minute seed atom a picture of every action ever performed, of every scene in which we have ever found ourselves, during the whole time from birth to death. George du Maurier and Jack London describe in " Peter Ibbetson" and in "The Star Rover," how a prisoner in the flesh may live over again the scenes of his childhood, where he sees himself, his playmates, his parents, his whole environment, effectively repro- duced from the etheric record of his child life or even of past lives. Any one who knows the secret of how to put himself in touch with these pictures may find and read the lives of the people with whom he comes in contact, as proved by mediums. But while fresh or contemporary records may be read with compara- tive ease, it becomes increasingly difficult to read as we go backwards, for the records which are made in the ether are faint compared with the ones in the next higher realms and fade gradually.
When a seer examines one who is about to become ill, he will find that the vital body is actually becom- ing more attenuated, and when it has reached a point of tenuity where it can no longer support the phys- ical body, the latter commences to manifest signs of what we call disease. Again, some time before we see physical recovery, the vital body gradually becomes more dense in structure; then the period of conval- escence commences. It is also patent to all who have
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to do with victims of accidents that they do not suffer as keenly just after the accident as later; this is be- cause the vital body at the time of the accident is uninjured, and therefore the whole effect of the acci- dent is not felt until this vehicle has become atten- uated and unable to support the vital processes. Thus we see that there are changes in the ether of a human being ; and according to the mystic axiom, ' ' As above, so below, " and vice-versa, there are also changes in the planetary ether which constitutes the vital body of the Earth Spirit. As the conscious memory of re- cent events which is strong in the human being grad- ually fades, so also the etheric record, which is the lowest aspect of the Memory of Nature, fades in time.
In the highest sub-division of the Region of Con- crete Thought, just on the border line between pure spirit and matter, an impress is made of the things and events in this world which is relatively much clearer and more lasting than -the etheric record, for while events inscribed upon the etheric record fade away in spots in a few hundred years, and even im- portant events may last only a thousand or two years, the record found in the highest sub-division of the Region of Concrete Thought lasts for the Earth Pe- riod. While the records made on the reflecting ether may be read by the uninstructed who have just a little spiritual sight, several initiations are required
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before it is possible for any one to read the records kept in the higher region noted above. You will readily understand the relation of this record to the one made in the ether, and also to the absolutely per- manent record which is inscribed in the World of Life Spirit, if you examine diagram No. 1 on page 52 of the Cosmo. Paracelsus calls the record made in the ether, Sidereal Light; and Eliphas Levi, the great Kabalist, speaks of these records as being kept in the Astral Light. This is in a sense correct, for though they have nothing to do with the stars, as the name would seem to imply, they are found in the Etheric Region outside the earth's atmosphere. The medium or hypnotic victim who leaves the body by negative processes under outside control, levitates to- wards these realms as naturally as our physical body gravitates towards the earth.
As stated in the Cosmo in connection with the con- stitution of our planet, the path of initiation goes through the earth from circumference to center, one stratum at a time, and though our physical bodies are drawn that way by the force of gravitation, their density prevents trespass as effectually as the force of levitation which repels the uninstructed class spoken of from sacred precincts. Only when by the power of our own spirit we have left our dense body, instructed by and because of right living, are we
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able to read the etheric record to best advantage. At a farther point of progress the " water stratum " in the earth is opened to the Initiate, and he is then in a position to read the record of past events perma- nently engraved in the living substance of the Region of Archetypal Forces, where duration and space are practically non-existent, and where all is an eternal Here and Now.
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